All possible words from letters in Python

Question

In my program, the user will enter the letters(max is 5), and program will generate all possible words from those letters. For example the user will enter "a b c". Words will be "abc", "acb" , "bac", "bca", "cab" and "cba".

How can i do it? I cannot find an algorithm. Thanks for your help.

Thanks for everyone for helps. I am beginner. I've learned permutation function new :)

https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html#itertools.permutations with one argument? — matsjoyce, Dec 17 '14 at 20:00
Please show us what you've tried (or even examples of algorithms you've seen, but which didn't quite meet your needs) and explain why it didn't work. — p.s.w.g, Dec 17 '14 at 20:01

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 17 '14 at 20:01

import itertools

In [146]: list(itertools.permutations('abc'))
Out[146]: 
[('a', 'b', 'c'),
 ('a', 'c', 'b'),
 ('b', 'a', 'c'),
 ('b', 'c', 'a'),
 ('c', 'a', 'b'),
 ('c', 'b', 'a')]

In [147]: [''.join(p) for p in itertools.permutations('abc')]
Out[147]: ['abc', 'acb', 'bac', 'bca', 'cab', 'cba']

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 17 '14 at 20:01

3

>>> import itertools
>>> for word in itertools.permutations("abc"):
...   print word, ''.join(word)
...
('a', 'b', 'c') abc
('a', 'c', 'b') acb
('b', 'a', 'c') bac
('b', 'c', 'a') bca
('c', 'a', 'b') cab
('c', 'b', 'a') cba

answered Dec 17 '14 at 20:01

Claudiu

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All possible words from letters in Python

2 Answers2